In the world of web development PSD to HTML conversion has become the standard way of achieving highly customized websites. Here the site is first designed in Photoshop which gives the designers immense creative freedom in terms of customizing the structure, color scheme, use of images and graphics etc. PSD files not being web-compatible are later converted into suitable markup such as HTML or XHTML. There are two distinct ways of converting a website from PSD to HTML; the first involves using software or a WYSIWYG editor and the second and the most preferred means is to hand code the website.
Advantages of Manual Conversion over Software Conversion
1. Quality of Codes - The quality of codes play a major role in the performance of the website. Software generated codes usually have lots of errors and bugs which denies you of the competitive edge. Manual coding undergoes W3C validation which helps you get rid of errors. It also validates the structure of the website and ensures it is shielded against frequent crashes.
2. Less Codes - Software tends to generate a large code base making your website heavy which takes longer time to render on a web browser. Hand coding on the other hand is done as per the need, keeping the code base small helping websites render faster on the web browser and increasing your popularity.
3. SEO Factor - Your website has to be optimized for the search engines. In manual coding developers follow semantic coding techniques. These codes attract search engine crawlers who rank your website high on the results pages. WYSIWYG on the other hand merely convert PSD to HTML which fail to leverage the search engines.
4. Design Consistency - A website needs to have consistency in design in terms of structure, colors, fonts etc. to impress the visitors. This can easily be achieved in hand coded websites with PSD to CSS conversion. Cascading Style Sheet encompasses all the visual attributes and maintains consistency throughout the website.
5. Scalable - Internet is a fast changing world and design and trends change in a whisker and this is where manual coding has an advantage. You can keep on altering the coding to match the new algorithms of the search engines. In case you use software you need to convert the file from scratch each time.
6. Cross Browser Compatible - Your visitors are likely to use different browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari etc. to browse your website. With manual coding you can ensure that the site appears and functions uniformly on all these browsers. Same isn't the case with software generated websites.
Manual PSD to XHTML/HTML conversion is a highly skill demanding job and only expert developers can ensure flawless codes in your website. They ensure your website adheres to the latest conventions of web development thereby improving your website’s ranking and offering your visitors a pleasant browsing experience. Thus when it comes to designing a custom website make sure you hire only the professionals.